An Overview Of Our Solution
We are a government school that develops the integral education modality, in the interior of the Northeastern state of Pernambuco, semiarid region, poor region, which is continuously affected by long periods of severe droughts, a region that is historically devastated by the unbridled deforestation that caused the silting of rivers and is currently causing desertification, salinization of the soil in large areas.
We work in a school that receives young people who live in situations of social vulnerability.
- Population Impacted: 4.000
- Continent: South America
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
The context of the region is a context of social emergency, we have just recently come out of a situation of declared public calamity due to the lack of water that devastated the region's economy for 7 years from 2010 to 2017, where the reservoirs collapsed, and social chaos gained proportions previously unthinkable. We are recovering from this situation, which can at any moment return with full force.
In order for this to happen, we need to change and make the population aware of changing habits, so that from school we can gain recognition, visibility in our actions, and so that we can increasingly develop actions that revert negative impacts in the ecosystem of the caatinga already so punished.
When I said that we need to make this environmental vision a priority for them, we need to demonstrate in real situations where they themselves are actors in these actions and for them to recognize that their ancestral practices in subsistence farming were a wrong practice.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
We will seek to pass on the best techniques so that we can apply in practice the teaching and awareness of sustainable practices, such as the reuse of wood, giving a new and suitable destination, not only for wood but also for other materials that could be recycled, reused and reused. teaching students and making them aware so that they can pass on this knowledge to an increasing number of people.
So that we can improve and develop new actions, new actions that send and serve as examples for the people of that region to change their practices and their understandings, so that people are aware and change their habits, their understanding, and adopt new practices with the natural habitats of our region of the caantinga, sertaneja depression, messoregion of the sertão, that suffers constantly with diverse socialambeintais problems.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
The behaviors that we wish to change, and we will continue in this attempt, is to change the consciousness of people, so that coexistence with the biome of the caatinga is more harmonious, and so that the interest in the development of new actions of coexistence with the drought are developed.
Our region needs new actions that promote coexistence with drought, the Brazilian northeast suffers from long periods of drought that mistreat the millions of residents of this region, with our actions we imagine and we will encourage these actions as an example.
We developed in the school actions in which we encourage the work with the reuse of medeira that would be being discarded, giving a different destiny so that these materials are not discarded incorrectly in the environment, and so that other trees do not have to be killed, and the nature does not be devastated, and so that the students of the region have and develop a new vision of new environmentally correct practices that change the harsh reality of this punished region.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
We will invite the school community, students, teachers involved in community gardening projects, as well as teachers who are not involved, and we will continue the wood reuse projects, involving the other players in the school community.
and invite the community of the city, neighborhoods near the school, which are the neighborhoods of good hope, neighborhood JK, Bairro Cidade Jardim, and other surrounding municipalities, because in our school adolescents from other nearby cities come and seek our courses.
And in this way we want to gain recognition of our actions, and the propagation of this ideal daluta for environmental preservation, the struggle for change of habits.
And, with our students being the protagonists of these actions, we will certainly be able to achieve visibility and reach in our actions, because this will be done pedagogically, in an educational way, in a constructive way, in an aggregate way with the students of our region.
Describe your implementation
First we need to change the concept of the environment that people have, people do not care, do not pay attention to the environment in which they live, in the northeast, where the school is located, the situation in the municipality of arcoverde, there is decades, it is environmental unsustainability, carelessness with the environment, people, do not care for the springs of the rivers, and the people dematam much for the production of coal, wood furniture and other derivatives.
Most of the rivers in the region, which have been perennial, have become intermittent with the succession of erroneous practices that succeed in decades of degradation; the situation is frightening the deforestation of the caatinga is widespread, as well as the rain forest areas of the coastal forest.
We also developed a work to produce vegetables and edible vegetables in free areas of the school, near the parking lot, close to the laboratories of the school, laboratories that are still precarious in the matter of educational materials with a low cost, which are necessary for there to be construction of knowledge.
Being that our production is totally organic without the use of pesticides, without the use of pesticides, or of chemicals harmful to the human organism, all aiming at the health and well-being of the adolescents who will dine with these foods.
The implementation of the improvements of these proposals will require that many inputs be used from the timber so that they can be reused, that they will be collected from places where they are incorrectly disposed, today we know that many natural resources are disposed of, disposed of in the wrong way, without any concern with the environment, and taking years and perhaps decades to decompose, polluting soils and water-based leaves, must give our share of contribution to changing that practice.and in situations of poverty and that depend on the assistance programs of the Brazilian government.
External connections
The external connections that we will seek, will be precisely the partnerships with other schools, with municipal governments of the surrounding cities, regional education commissions, with parents of the students, with other schools of the region that are implementing and carrying out similar or identical actions.
City halls and environmental secretaries can also provide seedlings of tree plants so that we can be reforesting the school environment, in areas we can develop these actions, and develop and implement environmental education and at a regional level, not only in our city as also in the surrounding cities.
we believe that only by constructing a pedagogical training in order to attend to the sjovens for the ameintal preservation can we change the reality of our region, bringing a new face to the formation of young people, imploring, at the initiative of the school itself, independently of regional management education, a new curriculum with workshops focused on the environment, which will cause a drop in the dynamics of students to seek only short courses of improvement aimed at enabling those young people to enter the predatory labor market.
It is increasingly certain that the proposal of change of attitude towards the environment is directly linked to a pedagogical proposal that does this work of changing in the long term the conscience of the people.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
At the moment the main actors who have already been impacted and changed their behavior, vision, have been, and are being, the students of the school, together with their friends in the community, and primarily the parents of the students, and the academic communities in general of the school , has been changing mentality with the students.
From the beginning we have always been aware that we would be directly or indirectly affected by a community, a contingent of people, who are increasingly sensitized by the comprehensiveness of environmental issues.Most young people living in this region are living in a precarious situation, looking for a quick professional training so that they can enter the market, and earn some money to help their families. Unfortunately the environmental issue is always left in the background.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
So far we have not used methodologies for measuring greenhouse gas releases, but we intend to produce scientific data on the amount of carbon dioxide we are no longer expelling into the atmosphere through our reforestation projects around the school, and of the communal gardens we are always working with.
When we can make measurements of how much greenhouse gases we will be leaving in the atmosphere, so that these measurements are part of a database that shows, and that is a reference so that other projects with the same intention can be done through bibliographic reviews. We know that we do not yet have the necessary technology and materials to make these measurements, and we also need to qualify our cadre to be able to handle this technology.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
There are several aspects that can be, and can already be, measured in several aspects, we start the projects and we begin to notice the awakening of students interest instantly, everyone started to like it a lot; summarizing the initiative had a lot of acceptance of the school community, everyone liked the idea and began to dedicate and disseminate to the outside community the school, extra school, which began to arouse interest even coming to the school to visit and appreciate the project initiatives, considered until then innovative in the region.
And if we succeed in this attempt, and our project is approved, we will be able to move our actions, we will be able to increase our performance, and we will be able to increase our reach and visibility.
these resources will serve so that we can acquire the necessary materials, which we still do not have yet, are many expenses to put a project of this standing here in Brazil.
The prices of things have risen a lot, we are experiencing a time of recession in the Country, the goods and inputs have tripled in price. and mainly, natural resources such as wood and plants for planting have significantly increased costs.
Sustainability
The current sustainability of this proposal is insufficient for what we plan to accomplish, in scale and planned proportion, because our budget is limited and reduced, we receive the transfers to the school in predetermined amounts, and therefore we can not proceed with some projects and proposals that arise, such as those of environmental sustainability.
Return on investment
Our main goal is to conserve people, showing through our actions the importance of doing these actions that benefit the environment.
we will impact people through our actions, which will be documented and taken and disseminated by the main media, communication vehicles of the region, which are the radios and social network pages of personalities that are not influential in the region, and of actors who have relevance in this scenario.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
The success we hope for is to be recognized and to prevent people, children and young people from awakening to this new conception of attitude towards the environment.
And we think that mainly through education we can reach this deeply desired level of change of mentality, so that people recycle reuse and reuse things, and so that our actions gain visibility and that the students of the school can replicate them and take them, and we will encourage them to do so in their localities, communities where they live.